From Sketch to Still: Colleen Atwood on Her Rooster-Feather, Chainmail, and Suede Designs for Snow White and the Huntsman

From Sketch to Still: Colleen Atwood on Her Rooster-Feather, Chainmail, and Suede Designs for Snow White and the Huntsman

Kristen Stewart’s suede Snow White costume begins as a gown, but is quickly converted into a tunic to accommodate the heroine’s Enchanted Forest adventures. In a nod to the princess's traditional dress, Atwood designed puff sleeves but opted for earth-toned hues in lieu of a primary color palette.

Photo: Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

About 20 variations of Stewart’s costume survived production—some short, some long, and some that were subjected to more intense aging processes to reflect Snow White’s wardrobe wear and tear later in the film.

Photo: Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Ravenna’s cloak was the very first piece that Atwood designed for the film. She had to make sure it would look gorgeous even when covered in oil.

Photo: Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

A milliner spent four weeks hand-cutting and mounting each rooster feather to the cloak.

Photo: Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Because of the costume’s weight, the dress was built with detachable parts so that, for example, Theron could remove the burdensome skirt if Sanders was filming a tight shot of the actress’s upper half.

Photo: Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

For what Atwood calls her “European wedding dress”—built from fabric found in Paris and gold details recovered in Italy—the designer says she immediately had a vision for the garment’s basic structure and toyed with the details once it was on the stand. “I knew that I wanted to do a caged collar,” she recalls. “I knew that I wanted to have an open sleeve with lacing up it, and I knew the basic shape.”

Photo: Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Of the architecturally inspired wedding gown, Atwood says that this was the first time she has “done a dress in light colors that from one side looks one way and from another side looks completely different. When an actor moves in it, it kind of shifts color.”

Photo: Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kristen Stewart’s suede Snow White costume begins as a gown, but is quickly converted into a tunic to accommodate the heroine’s Enchanted Forest adventures. In a nod to the princess's traditional dress, Atwood designed puff sleeves but opted for earth-toned hues in lieu of a primary color palette.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

About 20 variations of Stewart’s costume survived production—some short, some long, and some that were subjected to more intense aging processes to reflect Snow White’s wardrobe wear and tear later in the film.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Ravenna’s cloak was the very first piece that Atwood designed for the film. She had to make sure it would look gorgeous even when covered in oil.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

A milliner spent four weeks hand-cutting and mounting each rooster feather to the cloak.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

After production each day, the wardrobe department detached the cloak’s removable collar and stored it in a hatbox. The rest of the garment was kept on a stand under a protective layer of muslin.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Utility was key for Chris Hemsworth’s Huntsman costume. “He has a lot of layers to his clothing,” Atwood explains. “Everything had to be useful to him. For example, his big, heavy coat could also be used as a blanket to sleep on.”

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Atwood also helped design the Huntsman’s weaponry. According to production notes, “Atwood needed to design the axe rig on his back to enable him to grab his weapons quickly. Her team eventually settled on a rig that used magnets to secure the axes to the harness, allowing Hemsworth to access them with ease and speed.”

Because of the costume’s weight, the dress was built with detachable parts so that, for example, Theron could remove the burdensome skirt if Sanders was filming a tight shot of the actress’s upper half.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

For what Atwood calls her “European wedding dress”—built from fabric found in Paris and gold details recovered in Italy—the designer says she immediately had a vision for the garment’s basic structure and toyed with the details once it was on the stand. “I knew that I wanted to do a caged collar,” she recalls. “I knew that I wanted to have an open sleeve with lacing up it, and I knew the basic shape.”

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Of the architecturally inspired wedding gown, Atwood says that this was the first time she has “done a dress in light colors that from one side looks one way and from another side looks completely different. When an actor moves in it, it kind of shifts color.”

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

More gothic action-adventure than twee fairy tale, next month’s Snow White and the Huntsman subverts the age-old innocent-princess ideal thanks in part to costume designer Colleen Atwood’s vision for Kristen Stewart’s weaponized heroine. Although Atwood and director Rupert Sanders maintained the Brothers Grimm genetic code for the character—skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony—the pair opted against a restrictive gown, selecting a knee-length suede dress and boots more befitting of the script’s warrior princess.

The bold transformation was not something that Atwood, a three-time Oscar winner, for Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Alice in Wonderland, took lightly. “Snow White was one of the first movies I saw when I was a child,” she tells us. “There were certain things that were magical about the Disney character, and I loved the way she was dressed, but our character could hardly be dressed in red, blue and yellow.” Instead, the designer took a practical approach to Snow White’s understated ensemble, which Stewart wears for most of the movie, by determining how a young woman locked away in a tower for seven years realistically might be dressed. “I kind of backed into Snow White’s costume because it’s similar to what the servants in her castle wore,” Atwood explains. “She had been thrown in prison young, and it seemed reasonable that she would have been given something similar to [a servant’s uniform] to wear all of those years.”

Atwood did hold onto one aspect of Snow White’s signature frill. “I wanted to do the puff sleeve as a little nod to what the expectation is for Snow White,” she says. “But still, I wanted it to feel like a real piece of clothing and not a fluffy, girly thing.” As for rejecting the princess’s primary colors, the designer tells us, “We did some color tests with other color combinations, but the olive and light blue just suited Kristen’s eyes and hair. The colors also looked good in the forest and against many different backgrounds, which was important, because she is in it for so long.”

In addition to modernizing Snow White, Atwood, who is known for detailed, handcrafted costumes, created a dozen elaborate looks for Charlize Theron’s evil Queen Ravenna. The process, she says, was “the film equivalent of couture costume. Charlize is so beautiful and because she is so tall, I took advantage of her long limbs and height and stature to exaggerate torso length and make her look a bit more evil than I could have done with someone smaller.”

The very first piece that Atwood designed for the film was the queen’s transformation cloak, which had to be constructed early on so that the visual-effects department could digitally convert Ravenna’s cape into a flock of angry crows, a haunting illusion that is teased in trailers. Based on Atwood’s sketch and instructions, a milliner hand-trimmed and mounted rooster’s feathers to the finished product, which cost an estimated $32,000. Ultimately, two cloaks were made, since the script called for Ravenna to completely destroy one in an oil slick. As for the regal gold dress underneath the character’s expensive, shape-shifting, outerwear, Atwood explained, “It’s two embroidery patterns over each other to give it a really crusted, royal scale. This dress also goes through an oil slick and when that happens, the dress’s texture makes Ravenna look dark and wrinkled.”

As much as she enjoyed creating such whimsical costumes for Theron and Stewart, Atwood tells us, she has a sartorial appreciation for the other sex, too. “It actually is as fun to make men’s costumes,” she says, “especially if they are as good-looking as Chris Hemsworth. I think that sometimes people don’t understand that a costume that has to be worn every day and doesn’t change the whole movie becomes iconic. It’s very important because it requires a different design process, since you have to make something that people aren’t going to get tired of looking at. The costume goes away and becomes a second skin to the actor. Chris’s character had to sleep in it, eat in it, do everything in it. So every part of this costume is a real piece that had to have a function.”

After visiting the armor exhibition at London’s Wallace Collection museum for inspiration, Atwood designed Ravenna’s own battle fashion statement. For the queen’s climactic showdown with Snow White, she outfitted Theron in a chainmail gown with leather spike details that Atwood appropriately refers to as “the porcupine dress.” She commissioned triplicates of the costume, which was structured with stretch panels to accommodate Theron’s movements. All three copies were constructed like jewelry, with each chainmail link attached with a ring.

The fairest design of them all, however, might be Charlize Theron’s wedding gown, worn during Ravenna’s royal union to Snow White’s father, the ill-fated king. “The inspiration was more architectural,” Atwood says of the severely corseted dress. “The sleeves were made out of parchment that was cut and manipulated into a caged skeleton. It was our way of telegraphing [the queen’s] evil edge. All of the fine embroidered details are actually leather. I really wanted it to not be a fluffy wedding dress. I wanted it to have an edge to it, and that’s why I decided to go with pleats.” Although Sanders offered input about Atwood’s designs, the Oscar winner reveals that this particular costume rendered the director speechless. “He didn’t have a lot to say when he saw this one,” laughed Atwood. “It had the ‘wow’ factor for him. We could tell in early stages that this design would just work.”